Deep-Learning-Based Pre-Layout Parasitic Capacitance Prediction on SRAM Designs

To achieve higher system energy efficiency, SRAM in SoCs is often customized. The parasitic effects cause notable discrepancies between pre-layout and post-layout circuit simulations, leading to difficulty in converging design parameters and excessive design iterations. Is it possible to well predict the parasitics based on the pre-layout circuit, so as to perform parasitic-aware pre-layout simulation? In this work, we propose a deep-learning-based 2-stage model to accurately predict these parasitics in pre-layout stages. The model combines a Graph Neural Network (GNN) classifier and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) regressors, effectively managing class imbalance of the net parasitics in SRAM circuits. We also employ Focal Loss to mitigate the impact of abundant internal net samples and integrate subcircuit information into the graph to abstract the hierarchical structure of schematics. Experiments on 4 real SRAM designs show that our approach not only surpasses the state-of-the-art model in parasitic prediction by a maximum of 19X reduction of error but also significantly boosts the simulation process by up to 598X speedup.

TGDPO: Harnessing Token-Level Reward Guidance for Enhancing Direct Preference Optimization

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning from human feedback have shown that utilizing fine-grained token-level reward models can substantially enhance the performance of Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) in aligning large language models. However, it is challenging to leverage such token-level reward as guidance for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), since DPO is formulated as a sequence-level bandit problem. To address this challenge, this work decomposes the sequence-level PPO into a sequence of token-level proximal policy optimization problems and then frames the problem of token-level PPO with token-level reward guidance, from which closed-form optimal token-level policy and the corresponding token-level reward can be derived. Using the obtained reward and Bradley-Terry model, this work establishes a framework of computable loss functions with token-level reward guidance for DPO, and proposes a practical reward guidance based on the induced DPO reward. This formulation enables different tokens to exhibit varying degrees of deviation from reference policy based on their respective rewards. Experiment results demonstrate that our method achieves substantial performance improvements over DPO, with win rate gains of up to 7.5 points on MT-Bench, 6.2 points on AlpacaEval 2, and 4.3 points on Arena-Hard. Code is available at https://github.com/dvlab-research/TGDPO.

SwingArena: Competitive Programming Arena for Long-context GitHub Issue Solving

We present SwingArena, a competitive evaluation framework for Large Language Models (LLMs) that closely mirrors real-world software development workflows. Unlike traditional static benchmarks, SwingArena models the collaborative process of software iteration by pairing LLMs as submitters, who generate patches, and reviewers, who create test cases and verify the patches through continuous integration (CI) pipelines. To support these interactive evaluations, we introduce a retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) module that efficiently handles long-context challenges by providing syntactically and semantically relevant code snippets from large codebases, supporting multiple programming languages (C++, Python, Rust, and Go). This enables the framework to scale across diverse tasks and contexts while respecting token limitations. Our experiments, using over 400 high-quality real-world GitHub issues selected from a pool of 2,300 issues, show that models like GPT-4o excel at aggressive patch generation, whereas DeepSeek and Gemini prioritize correctness in CI validation. SwingArena presents a scalable and extensible methodology for evaluating LLMs in realistic, CI-driven software development settings. More details are available on our project page: swing-bench.github.io

RTime-QA: A Benchmark for Atomic Temporal Event Understanding in Large Multi-modal Models

Understanding accurate atomic temporal event is essential for video comprehension. However, current video-language benchmarks often fall short to evaluate Large Multi-modal Models' (LMMs) temporal event understanding capabilities, as they can be effectively addressed using image-language models. In this paper, we introduce RTime-QA, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the atomic temporal event understanding ability of LMMs. RTime-QA comprises 822 high-quality, carefully-curated video-text questions, each meticulously annotated by human experts. Each question features a video depicting an atomic temporal event, paired with both correct answers and temporal negative descriptions, specifically designed to evaluate temporal understanding. To advance LMMs' temporal event understanding ability, we further introduce RTime-IT, a 14k instruction-tuning dataset that employs a similar annotation process as RTime-QA. Extensive experimental analysis demonstrates that RTime-QA presents a significant challenge for LMMs: the state-of-the-art model Qwen2-VL achieves only 34.6 on strict-ACC metric, substantially lagging behind human performance. Furthermore, our experiments reveal that RTime-IT effectively enhance LMMs' capacity in temporal understanding. By fine-tuning on RTime-IT, our Qwen2-VL achieves 65.9 on RTime-QA.

PreMoe: Lightening MoEs on Constrained Memory by Expert Pruning and Retrieval

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) architectures enable scaling large language models (LLMs) to vast parameter counts without a proportional rise in computational costs. However, the significant memory demands of large MoE models hinder their deployment across various computational environments, from cloud servers to consumer devices. This study first demonstrates pronounced task-specific specialization in expert activation patterns within MoE layers. Building on this, we introduce PreMoe, a novel framework that enables efficient deployment of massive MoE models in memory-constrained environments. PreMoe features two main components: probabilistic expert pruning (PEP) and task-adaptive expert retrieval (TAER). PEP employs a new metric, the task-conditioned expected selection score (TCESS), derived from router logits to quantify expert importance for specific tasks, thereby identifying a minimal set of critical experts. TAER leverages these task-specific expert importance profiles for efficient inference. It pre-computes and stores compact expert patterns for diverse tasks. When a user query is received, TAER rapidly identifies the most relevant stored task pattern and reconstructs the model by loading only the small subset of experts crucial for that task. This approach dramatically reduces the memory footprint across all deployment scenarios. DeepSeek-R1 671B maintains 97.2\% accuracy on MATH500 when pruned to 8/128 configuration (50\% expert reduction), and still achieves 72.0\% with aggressive 8/32 pruning (87.5\% expert reduction). Pangu-Ultra-MoE 718B achieves 97.15\% on MATH500 and 81.3\% on AIME24 with 8/128 pruning, while even more aggressive pruning to 4/64 (390GB memory) preserves 96.95\% accuracy on MATH500. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/JarvisPei/PreMoe.

On-Policy Optimization with Group Equivalent Preference for Multi-Programming Language Understanding

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance in code generation tasks. However, a significant performance disparity persists between popular programming languages (e.g., Python, C++) and others. To address this capability gap, we leverage the code translation task to train LLMs, thereby facilitating the transfer of coding proficiency across diverse programming languages. Moreover, we introduce OORL for training, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that integrates on-policy and off-policy strategies. Within OORL, on-policy RL is applied during code translation, guided by a rule-based reward signal derived from unit tests. Complementing this coarse-grained rule-based reward, we propose Group Equivalent Preference Optimization (GEPO), a novel preference optimization method. Specifically, GEPO trains the LLM using intermediate representations (IRs) groups. LLMs can be guided to discern IRs equivalent to the source code from inequivalent ones, while also utilizing signals about the mutual equivalence between IRs within the group. This process allows LLMs to capture nuanced aspects of code functionality. By employing OORL for training with code translation tasks, LLMs improve their recognition of code functionality and their understanding of the relationships between code implemented in different languages. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our OORL for LLMs training with code translation tasks achieves significant performance improvements on code benchmarks across multiple programming languages.

ToTRL: Unlock LLM Tree-of-Thoughts Reasoning Potential through Puzzles Solving

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant reasoning capabilities, particularly through long chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, which can be elicited by reinforcement learning (RL). However, prolonged CoT reasoning presents limitations, primarily verbose outputs due to excessive introspection. The reasoning process in these LLMs often appears to follow a trial-and-error methodology rather than a systematic, logical deduction. In contrast, tree-of-thoughts (ToT) offers a conceptually more advanced approach by modeling reasoning as an exploration within a tree structure. This reasoning structure facilitates the parallel generation and evaluation of multiple reasoning branches, allowing for the active identification, assessment, and pruning of unproductive paths. This process can potentially lead to improved performance and reduced token costs. Building upon the long CoT capability of LLMs, we introduce tree-of-thoughts RL (ToTRL), a novel on-policy RL framework with a rule-based reward. ToTRL is designed to guide LLMs in developing the parallel ToT strategy based on the sequential CoT strategy. Furthermore, we employ LLMs as players in a puzzle game during the ToTRL training process. Solving puzzle games inherently necessitates exploring interdependent choices and managing multiple constraints, which requires the construction and exploration of a thought tree, providing challenging tasks for cultivating the ToT reasoning capability. Our empirical evaluations demonstrate that our ToTQwen3-8B model, trained with our ToTRL, achieves significant improvement in performance and reasoning efficiency on complex reasoning tasks.

VisionReasoner: Unified Visual Perception and Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Large vision-language models exhibit inherent capabilities to handle diverse visual perception tasks. In this paper, we introduce VisionReasoner, a unified framework capable of reasoning and solving multiple visual perception tasks within a shared model. Specifically, by designing novel multi-object cognitive learning strategies and systematic task reformulation, VisionReasoner enhances its reasoning capabilities to analyze visual inputs, and addresses diverse perception tasks in a unified framework. The model generates a structured reasoning process before delivering the desired outputs responding to user queries. To rigorously assess unified visual perception capabilities, we evaluate VisionReasoner on ten diverse tasks spanning three critical domains: detection, segmentation, and counting. Experimental results show that VisionReasoner achieves superior performance as a unified model, outperforming Qwen2.5VL by relative margins of 29.1% on COCO (detection), 22.1% on ReasonSeg (segmentation), and 15.3% on CountBench (counting).

UniMoCo: Unified Modality Completion for Robust Multi-Modal Embeddings

Current research has explored vision-language models for multi-modal embedding tasks, such as information retrieval, visual grounding, and classification. However, real-world scenarios often involve diverse modality combinations between queries and targets, such as text and image to text, text and image to text and image, and text to text and image. These diverse combinations pose significant challenges for existing models, as they struggle to align all modality combinations within a unified embedding space during training, which degrades performance at inference. To address this limitation, we propose UniMoCo, a novel vision-language model architecture designed for multi-modal embedding tasks. UniMoCo introduces a modality-completion module that generates visual features from textual inputs, ensuring modality completeness for both queries and targets. Additionally, we develop a specialized training strategy to align embeddings from both original and modality-completed inputs, ensuring consistency within the embedding space. This enables the model to robustly handle a wide range of modality combinations across embedding tasks. Experiments show that UniMoCo outperforms previous methods while demonstrating consistent robustness across diverse settings. More importantly, we identify and quantify the inherent bias in conventional approaches caused by imbalance of modality combinations in training data, which can be mitigated through our modality-completion paradigm. The code is available at https://github.com/HobbitQia/UniMoCo.

DiffPattern-Flex: Efficient Layout Pattern Generation via Discrete Diffusion

Recent advancements in layout pattern generation have been dominated by deep generative models. However, relying solely on neural networks for legality guarantees raises concerns in many practical applications. In this paper, we present \tool{DiffPattern}-Flex, a novel approach designed to generate reliable layout patterns efficiently. \tool{DiffPattern}-Flex incorporates a new method for generating diverse topologies using a discrete diffusion model while maintaining a lossless and compute-efficient layout representation. To ensure legal pattern generation, we employ {an} optimization-based, white-box pattern assessment process based on specific design rules. Furthermore, fast sampling and efficient legalization technologies are employed to accelerate the generation process. Experimental results across various benchmarks demonstrate that \tool{DiffPattern}-Flex significantly outperforms existing methods and excels at producing reliable layout patterns.